Jazz UK - February/March 2009

By Brian Blain

Not sure that Ms Moule's CD is a jazz album at all, for although the band boasts top guns like Alan Barnes and Mike Outram as well as occasional haunting colours from Clive Bell's shakuhachi, they are all deployed completely in the service of the songs by MD, pianist and organ player Simon Wallace, an absolute master of his craft. He can turn in those storytelling piano solos as well, check 'Remind Me'. Most of the material is from the growing canon of work by Wallace himself and that brilliantly sharp lyricist Fran Landesman, who specialises in wryly humorous appraisals of love and a certain kind of metropolitan angst - searching for chemical comfort, wondering why we're depressed - which peaks on the insinuatingly catchy 'Living In Overdrive'. Moule can actually strut, but you have to wait until track 10, Bob Dorough's 'Devil May Care' (boasting an insanely good bass solo from Alec Dankworth), for her to show it. So for once just forget about looking for jazz thrills and let the verbal intelligence, original tunes that you can actually remember and Sarah Moule's truly outstanding voice get under your skin. They certainly did mine.

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